As a regular op-ed columnist for the *Winnipeg Free Press* since October, 2004, I have had only two submissions refused by my editor, both of which concerned the Bush administration and information first discovered on your websites. Both of my rejected columns are attached; please feel free to publish them or to contact me at will.

If you were alive and old enough to remember November 22, 1963, you'll know exactly where you were and what you were doing when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. If, like me, you weren't yet born, you might remember seeing, for the first time, Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, a controversial work that, in Mr. Stone's words, was created to offer a “counter-myth” to the Warren Commission report that pinned the Kennedy assassination on ex-Marine and former Soviet defector Lee Harvey Oswald.

If you're old enough to be reading this column you'll certainly remember where you were and what you were doing when you learned jet airliners had been deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

While Mr. Oswald was plucked from his seat and arrested at a Dallas movie theatre exactly eighty minutes after the president was murdered, Mr. Bin Laden was fingered as the grand architect of the WTC attacks before Tower 1 collapsed, 102 minutes after impact.

Speaking of the building's collapse, actor Charlie Sheen, who was born in New York City and has appeared in two Oliver Stone films, was a recent guest (March 20) on The Alex Jones Show―a nationally syndicated talk radio program devoted mainly to conspiracy theories.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Sheen, “like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75% of their targets―that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions.... When the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother, 'Call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?'”

Conspiracy theory and wild speculation has thrived since the day of the attacks, but the Sheen interview marks a turning point, a paradigm shift, in the popular consciousness―much like the 1969 New Orleans trial of Clay Shaw, where prosecutor Jim Garrison, played in Mr. Stone's JFK by Kevin Costner, showed to the jury Abraham Zapruder's home movie of JFK's head being blown “back, and to the left,” supposedly indicating a second gunman on the grassy knoll. After the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report, which concluded that, “Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy,” American opinion was already inured to the notion that the government might've killed their own chief executive.

Mr. Sheen was particularly intrigued by a comment made by Larry Sliverstein, owner of WTC 7, the 47-storey Salomon Smith Barney tower that collapsed at 5:20 p.m.

“I remember,” said Mr. Silverstein in the 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, “getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”

“Pull,” in the demolition industry, is slang for “demolish.”

Were Alex Jones and Charlie Sheen the most prominent or credible doubters of the 9/11 Commission Report's explanation of the three skyscrapers' collapsing, it wouldn't be much of a debate. But some of the Commission's doubters carry credentials too legitimate to ignore.

Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, has published a paper, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse, suggesting that “WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by impact damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned cutter-charges.”

Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the Department of Labor during George W. Bush's first term and now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University has offered his opinion that, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling."

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, and author of Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington, and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, among other books, pointed out, in a February 6 essay published at counterpunch.org, “We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11.”

According to Dr. Robert M. Bowman Lt. Col., USAF, ret. who holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech, the NORAD exercises―a mock drill which simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast―conducted on the morning of September 11 were a deliberate cover to confuse NORAD personnel.

"The exercises that went on that morning,” said Mr. Bowman on Alex Jones's show, “simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD....that they didn't they didn't know what was real and what was part of the exercise.”

So, if not Mr. Bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?

"If I had to narrow it down to one person,” said Mr. Bowman, “I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney."

With―according to an August, 2004 Zogby poll―half of New Yorkers suspecting government leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," and an informal CNN Showbiz Tonight poll showing that 83 per cent of respondents agree with Charlie Sheen that “the US government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks,” it seems this debate will likely outlive us all.

“September 11,” said Mr. Sheen, “wasn't the Zapruder film. It was the Zapruder film festival.”